City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “No,” says Oskarsson. “No it is not. At least, it is not if any sensible guard does not wish to be placed on suspension without pay, at least.”

  Björck knows that Oskarsson does not make idle threats when it comes to suspension. He shuts his mouth and looks away as Oskarsson laughs. “Always so serious, Björck. That is your problem.” He reaches for the sword. “So serious that no one can ever stand to be around y—”

  He stops short when his hand touches the sword. Then he just stands there, apparently frozen.

  “Uh. Sir?”

  Oskarsson stares straight ahead, mouth open, face blank.

  “Oskarsson? Sir? Are you all right?”

  He does not respond. His throat makes a few low clicks.

  “Should I fetch a medic, sir?”

  Björck shivers then, not from fear but because it is suddenly bitterly, bitterly cold, as if an icy wind just happened to snake down the shore and through his sleeves. He glances at the sword and pauses, staring at its blade.

  Just a few moments ago the blade was facing Oskarsson’s face, the young man’s arrogant eyes reflected back at him. But now it’s different. Now the face in the sword is not human at all.

  It is like a mask, perhaps made of metal, wrought in the image of a crude, skeletal face, eyes small and far apart, the nose a tiny slit. Strange, monstrous-looking horns and tusks blossom from the back of the mask, like some kind of depraved substitution for hair.

  Björck looks at Oskarsson’s face. It is still the same face, though his gaze is dead and lifeless. Yet the sword now shows this other, distorted creature standing in his place.

  All intelligence slowly dies in Oskarsson’s face. A slow exhale escapes from his lips in a hiss. Then the hiss catches voice and becomes a low, loud humming noise—a sustained om that grows and grows. The buzzing, moaning sound does not seem to get louder, but instead seems to burrow within Björck’s ears and even his body, resonating with his feet, arms, bones, then with the very brick of the seawall road, an endless moan that far exceeds the capacity of any human lung.

  “Sir,” says Björck. “What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?”

  Oskarsson lifts his head to stare at the sky. A waterfall of blood erupts from his eyes and nose and mouth, pouring out of his face to run down his body. Björck watches in horror as the blood twists around Oskarsson’s shoulders, congealing and blackening, turning a rainbow of strange and monstrous colors, almost seeming to harden. It is as if this rain of gore has its own mind and it is cocooning him, remaking him into…something.

  Björck shrieks in terror. Perhaps it is out of instinct—or perhaps it is due to his own long-suppressed feelings about Oskarsson himself—but Björck darts forward and shoves Oskarsson, sending the man toppling backward, over the seawall and into the dark waters, still clutching the immensely heavy sword.

  There’s a quiet sploosh. Björck looks at his hands, which are covered in dark blood. Then, screaming, he sprints for the nearest guard.

  ***

  “Hold on,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Yes,” says Sigrud, bristling. “Hold on.”

  Signe holds her hands up with the air of a schoolteacher asking for silence. “I have already considered your objections. You,” she says to Mulaghesh, “don’t want me around because you don’t trust me. However, I am likely the person who knows the coastline the best, as I’ve been staring at maps of it for what feels like most of my life. And I’m the one who’s been there. And you,” she says to Sigrud, “don’t want me to do it because you think it’s dangerous. You would prefer to do it yourself, because you are used to being in danger, and in fact you prefer to do this sort of dashing skullduggery rather than do what you need to be doing, which is staying here and inspiring the one thousand Dreylings working night and day to keep their national economy afloat. However, having seen morale hugely increase since your arrival, I will not allow it to now fall. Your place is here, with the people who are working for you. In the grand scheme of things, I am”—she grits her teeth, and seems to have to dig the final words out of some nasty part of herself—“less important than you.”

  “Aren’t you basically running the harbor?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “Somewhat,” she says. “After a few final large obstructions are cleared, we have multiple strategic plans for mopping up, ones that I designed months ago. I can afford to be missing for a few days, or I can soon.”

  Sigrud shakes his head. “I do not like this,” he says. “I do not like this plan one bit.”

  Signe rolls her eyes. “You forget I have been to some of the most difficult parts of Voortyashtan. I was raised in them.”

  “And I have no desire to see you go back to them!”

  “If the general here is correct—and I am reluctantly forced to admit that she, at least, believes it to be true—then everything I’ve worked for is in peril,” says Signe. “Everything I’ve spent my life preparing could be destroyed!”

  “Your life?” says Sigrud. “You think five years is a life? Five years is no time at all, it is a blink of an eye!”

  “Five years for me,” says Signe, “but we are talking billions of drekels hanging in the balance here—fortunes for decades to come!”

  “Do you think only in money? Is that what you’ve become?

  “Money?” says Signe, furious. “Money? You think I’m here to make money? No, Father dear, what I’m here to do is put you both out of a job!”

  Sigrud and Mulaghesh glance at one another.

  “Huh?” says Mulaghesh.

  “People like you,” says Signe. “You think the world’s decided in fortresses, atop battlements, from far behind razor wire and fences. It’s not, not anymore. The world’s decided in countinghouses. We don’t listen to the march of boots; we listen to type machines and calculation machines pounding out revenues and budgets. This is how civilization progresses—one innovation at the right time, changing the very way the world changes. It just needs one big push to start the momentum. Thinadeshi herself knew that. She tried. And we are left to take up her work.”

  Sigrud shakes his head. “I…I do not doubt you. And I do not doubt what you are doing. I commend you for it.”

  “Then what?”

  “I just…I just wish you to know that there is more to life than this. There is more to life than these…these great tasks we set for ourselves.”

  Signe slowly grinds out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You misjudge me.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “You do not know me. If you wanted to, you would.”

  “If I could have broken down those prison walls, I—”

  “I know you were on the Continent for almost a decade!” shouts Signe. “I know you were free for years, running about with Komayd, doing her dirty work! You could have come home at any time if you wanted to, you could have known us if you wanted to, but you didn’t! You just left us up here, in this…this hell!”

  “I did not wish to expose you to what I was!” he says. “The…the things I saw in prison…the things I did, the things they did to me…Your lives were better off without me.”

  “Until Komayd said it was time for you to run home,” says Signe. She laughs bitterly. “Here is the truth of it, Father. You are a brave man when you have a knife in your hand. But when faced with another person who truly needs you, I think you are a cowa—”

  She stops as they hear the sirens sounding in the harbor, a low, rising wail.

  “What in hells is that?” says Mulaghesh.

  Signe looks to the windows. “The alert siren,” she says. “Something’s wrong. We…We must be under attack!”

  ***

  Signe, Sigrud, and Mulaghesh all sprint up toward the first floor of the SDC building, only to find Signe’s chief of security Lem sprinting in the opposite direction. “There you are,” he says, gasping. “We had some…some kind of attack happen.”

  “Where?” demands Signe. “What happened?”

  “It’
s out front. Just in front of the lighthouse, in fact. Should we notify the fortress?”

  Signe looks to Mulaghesh, who nods once.

  “Yes,” says Signe. “Better safe than sorry. Now show me.”

  As they walk, Lem summarizes the events. “…Deputy Chief Oskarsson stopped him just outside to inspect the package, and found it was some kind of…sword.”

  “Sword?” says Mulaghesh.

  “Yes. A ceremonial sword of some kind.” He looks at her sidelong. “I take it you don’t know about this?”

  Mulaghesh grimly shakes her head.

  Lem shoves the door open for them as they run outside. “That’s not good.”

  “So what?” says Signe. “Someone tried to give Mulaghesh a sword? Exactly how did this constitute an attack serious enough to sound the alarm?”

  “Well…Because then this happened.”

  He gestures ahead to the seawall road, where two SDC trucks sit idling in the road. Beside them stands a crowd of armed Dreylings looking at something on the ground. When they see Lem and Signe they part and stand back.

  Something dark and thick lies in puddles on the road. Sigrud sniffs the air. “Blood,” he says softly.

  “Yes,” Lem says, leading them over.

  “Was someone injured?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “That’s…much less clear, ma’am,” says Lem. He points to a group of guards huddled on the other side of the road, then gestures to them. They escort over a tall, jittery Dreyling. The man’s face is pale as snow, and his breath has the sour smell of vomit to it.

  “Björck,” says Signe to the pale Dreyling. “What happened?”

  He shakes his head. “Jakob…I mean, Deputy Chief Oskarsson…He opened the box, and he touched the sword, and then he just…changed.”

  As they listen to his story, Mulaghesh and Sigrud exchange a glance. Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow—Divine?

  Sigrud nods once. Almost certainly.

  Björck shakes his head. “The sound he made was so horrible…I panicked. I pushed him. He fell over the wall, into the waters. But the sword did something to him. Before I pushed him, when I looked at his reflection in the blade, he…it wasn’t him anymore, it was something else. Something else standing in his place.”

  Mulaghesh and Sigrud look over the seawall. The waters are dark and swirling, sloshing up and down a small concrete loading dock just fifteen feet below them. “I assume that would have happened to me if I’d gotten it,” says Mulaghesh. “Who gave you the box to deliver? Was it a woman?”

  The Dreyling nods.

  “And what did she look like?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “I could not see her. She wore a cloak, and a scarf….And it was raining then.”

  Sigrud leans out over the water, frowning, though Mulaghesh can’t see what worries him so.

  “What did she sound like?” asks Mulaghesh. “Old? Young?”

  “She sounded…I do not know. Normal. No strong accent, nothing notable. She was short. Wore dark robes. She just went up to the street there.” He points.

  Sigrud cocks his head, still staring at the waters below the seawall.

  “We could do searches in the city,” says Signe. “But a fat lot of good that will do. So many people come i—”

  Sigrud says, “There is something down there.”

  “What? Besides the ocean, you mean?” says Signe.

  “Yes…There is something rising u—”

  There’s a sudden thrashing sound in the water below them, and something huge goes whirring up into the night sky, bursting from the waters like a startled dove. The crowd of Dreylings gasps and watches its ascent, a spinning, whirring arc of glimmering steel that dances through the air toward one of the SDC cranes—

  It’s a sword, thinks Mulaghesh, but who threw it?

  —and slices through the crane’s supports like they were made of butter.

  There’s a pause as physics decides what to do with the several tons of metal suddenly suspended in the sky. Then the crane tips, yaws, and with the groaning sounds of an old man climbing out of bed, begins to slowly tumble to the ground.

  “Run!” screams Signe. “Run! Out of the way, out of the way!”

  It seems to happen in slow motion, like a battleship falling from the sky. The very impact is so great it knocks people off their feet. Dust and sea spray washes over them, even though it fell several hundred feet away. Mulaghesh watches in mute terror as some of the closer, unluckier Dreylings fall in a shower of deadly shrapnel.

  Mulaghesh continues tracking the sword spinning through the sky as the plume of dust pours over them. She watches as it slashes up, up, up, and finally begins to turn, hurtling back down to them, perhaps threatening to cut the very world in half.

  But it doesn’t. Instead its grip smacks into the open palm of someone’s hand, raised up high above the seawater.

  She stares at the hand, then at its owner, who is now walking up the dock, water still pouring off their back.

  At first the thing seems to be no more than some tangled wreckage washed ashore, a repulsive amalgam of coral and metal and bone. But as the water pours off of it her eyes discern shoulders, arms, and a crude, skeletal face. She sees the back adorned in horns and tusks and blades, the wrists lined with serrated teeth, every inch built to harm, to hurt, to destroy, as if this thing’s mere passage through the world could wreak unspeakable destruction.

  The sword hums in the figure’s hand. It looks at the sword, head cocked, as if beholding a beauty it has not experienced in ages.

  It is a Voortyashtani sentinel. But it is far larger than the sentinels she saw in her visions, and its armor is far more ornate, far more terrifying.

  The sword vibrates, humming and buzzing, and somewhere in that awful sound is a voice—one that does not speak to their minds as much as directly speak to their souls, crying, Battle and war! The last war, the last war!

  Suddenly she recognizes the thing standing on the dock, and understands what—or, rather, who—is now striding into Voortyashtan.

  “Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know how but—it’s fucking Saint Zhurgut!”

  ***

  “Who?” says Sigrud.

  “It can’t be!” says Signe. “How is that possi—”

  She never finishes the sentence: Saint Zhurgut studies his surroundings, raises his sword, and flings it forward once again. Everyone dives to the ground as the massive arc of steel hurtles through the air. It smashes into the SDC trucks, punching through one of them like it’s made of paper and clipping another, which then slowly tips over from the blow.

  They watch as the sword rips through the air with a low om hum that sounds, Mulaghesh realizes, a lot like what Björck described. The sword goes speeding back into the saint’s hand, who then turns at the top of the dock and begins to calmly walk toward them.

  Mulaghesh takes a deep breath and bellows, “Open fire!”

  She’s not their commander, but the Dreyling guards quickly oblige, lining up along the seawall and opening up on Zhurgut. The sound that fills the air is a dreadfully familiar one to Mulaghesh: it is the sound of countless bullets uselessly bouncing off of Divine armor. She still hears it in her dreams, echoes of the Battle of Bulikov, and even though the bolt-action riflings are far more advanced they don’t seem to do much damage: Saint Zhurgut pauses as if taking a moment to regard this new phenomenon, his masked face swiveling to take in the sparks flying off of his chest and arms. Then he crouches and leaps.

  Mulaghesh hears the om sound again, and thinks, The sword’s dragging him. It’s pulling him through the air.

  The saint comes plummeting down, his sword moaning and shrieking. Again, Mulaghesh hears words in that strange sound, murmuring, I am battle incarnate. I am a weapon wielded by Her hand.

  When he lands one of the SDC guards dissolves in a spray of blood, vivisected from collarbone to crotch. She watches in horror as the man has a moment to take in his situation—his dangling head craning down, wide-eyed—
until the two halves of his body fall away and he topples over. The saint rolls forward—dragged, it seems, by some propulsion emanating from his sword—and the giant blade slashes up, around, and through the crowd of SDC guards. Mulaghesh watches as six stout men seem to dissolve, like cloth puppets having their threads pulled apart.

  “Fucking hells!” shouts Mulaghesh. “Take cover!”

  Sigrud and Signe sprint in one direction toward a rickety fish shop up the hill, while Mulaghesh, Lem, and the other SDC guards take cover down the street. They find an old slate wall along a vacant lot and immediately take up positions. The guards wheel around and aim at the metal figure slowly stalking up the oystershell street.

  “Don’t shoot yet!” says Mulaghesh quickly. “Don’t attract his atten—”

  Too late: there’s a series of pops as the riflings go off. Saint Zhurgut swivels his crude face to look at them. Then he raises the sword, there’s the droning om sound, and then…

  The slate wall seems to explode. A rain of stones shoves her to the ground. Dust clouds her eyes. Then everything goes dark.

  ***

  Children screaming. Fires dancing beneath the night sky. The bright cold face of the moon and the cold clinging mist.

  I always knew I’d come back here, she thinks dreamily. Back to this place, where we wrought death so gladly…

  She watches through puffy eyes as a ragged child totters through the firelit streets, screaming for its mother.

  It’s good that I’m dying here, she thinks. I deserved it. I deserve it.

  “General? General?”

  Mulaghesh tries to speak. Her mouth is thick and bloody. “Wh-Where am I?”

  “Are you all right, General?”

  She opens her eyes to see an unfamiliar face standing over her: a young Saypuri officer, apparently a captain, wearing a closely wrapped headcloth and sporting a trim, neat beard. He has the look of a poet about him—something dreamy to his large, dark eyes—and she wonders who he is. Perhaps he’s one of her long-forgotten comrades who died in some faded conflict or another.

  “Am I dead?” she croaks.